I'd love to go to Mars – so just beam me up, Kim Jong-un

I’d love to go to Mars, but I’m scared of flying. If I can’t take a two-hour flight to Majorca without bursting into tears, I don’t know how I’ll last a two-year flight through space. That said, I do really, really want to see the Red Planet. Imagine the thrill of stepping on to an alien world, bouncing across the sandy surface towards a crater illuminated by the glowing sun. To have boldly gone where no one has gone before and finally be out of mobile reach of my mother. Sorry mum, but I’ve moved to Mars. Someone else is going to have to talk you through video-taping Downton Abbey.

All of which is why I so admire Gillian Finnerty, one of the 1,058 people shortlisted to take part in the Mars One project. Given that she is only 21 and, if the mission went ahead, would end up spending her entire life on Mars, a lot of people are asking why she’s doing it. Gillian, however, clearly knows her own mind. Settling down for ever is “the only way you can actually do a mission to Mars and land there”, she explains, “because otherwise you just won’t have enough fuel to go there and come back. It does scare me a little, but it’s not going to put me off. I’d rather go and not come back than not go at all.”

And she’s far from alone in getting the intergalactic wanderlust: an incredible 202,000 people initially volunteered to take part. A little while ago we interviewed megalo-millionaire starman Richard Branson for The Telegraph’s podcast (The Telegram), who told us about an excellent joke that he once pulled. He and internet tycoon Larry Page announced on the morning of April 1 that they were setting up a one-way trip to Mars: “And that morning, after the announcement, there were many husbands and wives who told their respective partners and children that they were very sorry but they were going to give up everything and go on this voyage and disappear. And when at lunchtime we announced that it was an April Fool’s joke, there was a lot of making up to do…”

Well, that’s embarrassing, but at 21 Gillian presumably has fewer personal commitments to leave behind. Indeed, we ought to be grateful that youngsters like her are prepared to make the trip. We wouldn’t want the only people who go to Mars to be those who reckon they’ve got nothing to lose. A colony made up of the bankrupt, the depressed and Neil and Christine Hamilton would make a marvellous French existentialist play but a pretty rubbish new frontier. Although the thought of seeing Neil bobbing about the alien surface in a spacesuit with a bow-tie might be worth the ticket price alone.

No, what we need are young go-getters willing to take big risks to build the future. I can see in Gillian something of the British colonists who braved the oceans to go to America, uncertain of what they’d find there or if they’d even survive the first week. History is made by those who’ll gamble everything for a shot at glory. To be not just a footnote in history, but maybe a whole chapter.

Boy, I’d like to go with them – if only to turn a star trip into a power trip. I bet I could persuade Gillian and the other astronauts to make me king of my own airless socialist paradise, governed by the dictum: “From everyone else according to their ability, to me according to my needs.”

Mind you, knowing my luck, we’d probably find out that someone got the idea first. What if the North Koreans weren’t lying to us about being the Scientific Super Nation Number One in The Whole Wide World? Imagine touching down to discover that they’d built Kim Jong-un’s Happy Times Casino on Mars years before. Kim sticks his chubby little head out of the window and shouts: “Hey running-dog lackeys! Get off my land!”